Word Finder - authority

definition

The power to enforce rules or give orders.

example

I have the authority to penalise the staff in my department, but not the authority to sack them.

definition

(used in singular or plural form) Persons in command; specifically, government.

definition

A person accepted as a source of reliable information on a subject.

example

the world's foremost authority on orangutans

definition

Government-owned agency which runs a revenue-generating activity.

Now he was exerting his authority in another way.

I didn't mean to sound like some kind of authority on the subject.

Still, what business could survive without a person with final authority on decisions?

Even then he had begun to distrust the authority of tradition and his teachers.

People that dictate the rules make decisions for others with much authority.

He's unaccustomed to having his authority challenged.

It is important to respect and submit to the authority to which you are assigned to.

Anyone in authority seemed habitually out of the office after Dean gave his name.

Her father had been the final authority, but never had she questioned her mother's authority.

It had to be difficult to maintain any semblance of authority with a toddler clinging to his face, but he managed to do it.

Had Giddon overstepped his authority?

News and information that undermine their credibility or authority aren't so welcome either.

He had neither authority nor right to ignore her emphatic command that he leave her place and remain silent about what he'd seen.

Even then there is no appeal to authority; nothing is accepted from without.

It is a most valuable authority for the events of his own times.

They appear to have recognized the paramount authority of a family descended from a chief named Monaheng.

His military authority was confined to Italy; and his power of life and death over the citizens was at an early period limited by law.

As a lecturer, he was inferior in charm and eloquence to Brown and Stewart; the latter says that "silent and respectful attention" was accorded to the "simplicity and perspicuity of his style" and "the gravity and authority of his character."

Modern economic criticism and analysis has destroyed the authority of the " old Political Economy " as a scientific system.

An enlarged edition of the latter, under the title of Exercitationes, &c., was published in 1677; but neither of these writers is of much authority.

Far better both as draughtsman and as authority was George Edwards, who in 1 743 began, under the same title as Albin, a series of plates with letterpress, which was continued by the name of Gleanings in Natural History, and finished in 1760, when it had reached seven parts, forming four quarto volumes, the figures of which are nearly always quoted with approval.4 The year which saw the works of Edwards completed was still further distinguished by the appearance in France, where little had been done since Belon's days,' in six quarto volumes, of the Ornithologie of MathurinJacques Brisson - a work of very great merit so far as it goes, for as a descriptive ornithologist the author stands even now unsurpassed; but it must be said that his knowledge, according to internal evidence, was confined to books and to the external parts of birds' skins.

Hence it is that Gmelin appears as the authority for so much of the nomenclature now in use.

Its chief drawback is that it does not give any more reference to the authority for a generic term than the name of its inventor and the year of its application, though of course more precise information would have at least doubled the size of the book.

Two supplementary parts were issued in 1835 and 1840 respectively, and the work for many years deservedly maintained the highest position as the authority on European ornithology-indeed in England it may almost without exaggeration be said to have been nearly the only foreign ornithological work known; but, as could only be expected, grave defects are now to be discovered in it.

Like Gloger, Sundevall in his ideal system separated the true passerines from all other birds, calling them Volucres; but he took a step further, for he assigned to them the highest rank, wherein nearly every recent authority agrees with him; out of them, however, he chose the thrushes and warblers to stand first as his ideal " Centrum " - a selection which, though in the opinion of the present writer erroneous, is still largely followed.

Yet it is said, on good authority, that Nitzsch had the patience so to manipulate the skins of many rare species that he was able to ascertain the characters of their pterylosis by the inspection of their inside only, without in any way damaging them for the ordinary purpose of a museum.

Justin is a most valuable authority for the life of the Christian Church in the middle of the 2nd century.

In 1198, on the election of Enrico Dandolo, the aristocracy carried their policy one step farther, and by the promissione ducale, or coronation oath, which every doge was required to swear, they acquired a powerful weapon for the suppression of all that remained of ancient ducal authority.

The chief county authority is the board of commissioners of three members elected for terms of two years.

The chief township authority is the board of trustees of three members, elected by popular vote for two years.

He also published several sermons, and Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Physical science, if there was anything deserving that name, was cultivated, not by experiment in the Aristotelian way, but by arguments deduced from premises resting on authority or custom.

His De Conciliorum Auctoritate was welcomed at Rome as exalting the papal authority.

In spite of this very limited reception the Formula Concordiae has always been reckoned with the five other documents as of confessional authority.

The stronger current of modern authority is in favour of the landlords and not in favour of restricting the meaning of covenants of this class.

Watt's exhaustive work on Wild and Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World (1907) is the latest authority on the subject; and his views on some debated points have been incorporated in the following account.

The president of the order, whose office was elective and who enjoyed the dignity for life, had supreme authority among them.

The real founder of the house, however, was Robert the Strong, who received from Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, the countships of Anjou and Blois, and who is sometimes called duke, as he exercised some military authority in the district between the Seine and the Loire.

The critical method which has since become almost a formal system, aiming at scientific certainty, was with him an unexampled power, based on the insight acquired from wide knowledge, which enabled him to judge the credibility of an author or the genuineness of an authority; but he has made it impossible for any one to attempt to write modern history except on the "narratives of eye-witnesses and the most genuine immediate documents" preserved in the archives.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that the Church did not, after the first struggle between Dagobert and Baldwin I., actively oppose by any hierarchical pretensions the authority of the crown.

Until about 1840 the authority followed for its history was naturally the great work of William of Tyre.

But about 5840 Ranke suggested, and von Sybel in his Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges proved, that Albert of Aix was not a good authority, and that consequently William of Tyre must be set aside for the history of the First Crusade, and other and more contemporary authorities used.

He is the primary authority for the First Crusade.

His account of the First Crusade itself is poor (he was absent at Edessa during its course), but otherwise he is an excellent authority.

His book thus begins to be a real authority only from the date of the Second Crusade onwards; but the perfection of his form (for he is one of the greatest stylists of the middle ages) and the prestige of his position conspired to make his book the one authority for the whole history of the first century of the Crusades.

Of these the Byzantine authority, the Alexiad of Anna Comnena, is most important, partly from the position of the authoress, partly from the many points of contact between the Byzantine empire and the crusaders.

For the Second Crusade the primary authority in the West is the work of Odo de Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII regis Francorum in Orientem.

It is from the Second Crusade that William of Tyre, representing the attitude of the Franks of Jerusalem, begins to be a primary authority; while on the Mahommedan side a considerable authority emerges in Ibn Athir.

The various continuations of William of Tyre above mentioned represent the opinion of the native Franks (which is hostile to Richard I.); while in Nicetas, who wrote a history of the Eastern empire from 1118 to 1206, we have a Byzantine authority who, as Professor Bury remarks, "differs from Anna and Cinnamus in his tone towards the crusaders, to whom he is surprisingly fair."

For the Fourth Crusade the primary authority is Villehardouin's La Conquete de Constantinople, an official apology for the diversion of the Crusade written by one of its leaders, and concealing the arcana under an appearance of frank naïveté.